The Diary

Evelyn,

I had found the diary by coincidence it seemed, walking one day, dirty (it was raining heavily), mud caking to my shoes along the wood-trails of Van Cortlandt Park.  Brad had favored Central Park for the duration of our time in New York, as most New Yorkers do, but I had found myself taking the train to Woodlawn Heights at first weekly, and then daily the second winter we were there.

The winter was still, and so I was driven out onto the street.  We were alone, also; no more wives or girlfriends for that time until they would return in the new year.  It was only the three of us, liberated for the first time, yes, but beginning to feel it's eventual sting of isolation.  And so I became acquainted, rather intimately, with the John Muir trail.

As I said, it had been raining.  The woods dripped a morose way near the aqueduct, and it was nearby when I spotted it - a flash of red which made my heart stop.  I thought at first it was a cardinal, or stray graffiti, but it was somehow smooth and reflective, and therefore artificial.  It was coming up out of the ground, as if it could not stay buried where it was (a trait I would come to know is yours in singularity).

You may be curious to know exactly how rain affects the colors around us.  In the dimmer lights filtered by clouds, I was told once it allows our eyes to better interpret and differentiate color.  In the rain, when senses are heightened thus, my favorite things to examine are soil, and stone.

Under the fluorescent greens, I saw amid the dung brown and vivid mulch of the leaves of the foregone autumn, the plastic bag protecting a corner of the diary.  I dug it loose with my hands, mucking it from it's casket.  It was the color of all my thoughts, interrupted.  The color of my heart stopping.

When I had pulled it loose, I took it with me to the creek and washed the grime from it and my hands before opening it, to examine the contents.

The interior of the bag had no scent but plastic.  When I saw the writing within begin at the top of the first page, aching girlish in loops of uncertainty, I closed it without reading the words at all.  You see, I realize I had committed a terrible sin.

The Red Woods of October

The Red Woods of October

Red Rocking Chair

Life has a steady forward movement, marked in even hours and predictable turns of the sun and moon.  Some of this is arbitrary, and some is necessary.  My first enemy was time.

I can remember, or I think I remember, moments when time elevated me and everyone around me in a fast wind, and I could feel the adults lift their feet from the ground, pull their hands inside the cab, and let the leaves swirl around us with tornado force while we plummeted off of a cliff and into the blue space of the unknown.

"What's that?" I can remember asking about the sound of the great beast accelerating - the engines of time pushing this Earth delicate as an egg into the black arms of empty space.  We have no place to live... We have nothing to eat... They have come for the car... And the strings pull long and then, let go, before resuming so fast I can no longer see his fingers steady on the neck.

When the wind rises, so does my heart, to listen to a call I think most people have forgotten.  When the wind comes, it means...

"Are we leaving?"

And my question is met with not only silence, but derision.  Because they're trapped here, while I'm not.

Montague Road

But people, with their ribbons, will try.  They unspool from the heart, green and blue and yellow, and tie with promises around waists and wrists and too tightly around the neck.  The beginnings of my sexual education were dance steps to avoid these being cast by all around me.

When I was stagnated to the ground, and the wind wouldn't carry me away like a dandelion seed to be as light as I felt, I walked to places too far to be found, and I let the ribbons of my heart go, into the trees, or out to the wind, where no one could have them but birds.

While outwardly, I had learned to be a girl, I was living inside the shell of one; a kind of unknowable boy responsive to fear and agony.

There was nowhere on Earth more desolate than this place, we made sure of it.  The high desert autumn was dry and bright and the ground bleached white, pocked with browning leaves blowing in a bitter wind.  It was the only place I'd ever go, where it's easy to learn things like how easy it is to let love die, or roll forever into nothingness.

Forest On Fire

In isolation, there is nothing left but principle nature.  Adam once asked me, did I want to know what he'd learned, being alone for so long, as if I didn't know the answer would be this.  Not who he is, but what he is.

The nature of me is exactly this long - this longing feeling to disappear into the smoke of a force destructive enough to blot out the sun - to outlast it until the last ringing sound dies at the end of all things.

Impasse

A girl's power is a coiled fox, dangerous because it is indiscriminate in it's target.  They're unwieldy animals who do not consider risk against reward.  All pain is necessary, all costs regrettable but not enough.   In my nature is an animal who doesn't mind breaking the neck of the thing I love to free it from a trap.  It doesn't mind chewing off a limb to simply die elsewhere.  God and I have always been at an impasse.  As much as I want to be consumed by him or his crushing worlds, the movements I make inside him never fail to alienate us.

Night Terror

The only way I know how to love anything is to dedicate the tooth and claw of this animal to a boy who will never know the difference, and let every other ribbon unroll and vanish in the wind.

Aurora Gone

The girl everyone sees becomes a stand-in for the girl no one sees.  The girl no one sees bunkers down to weather this thing, and then this one, suffering them like indignities in a prison, until the voice comes like a suspicion.

The voice is low and hateful, and the hand is hard and flat.  My back to a wall, the wall opens, becomes a door, and the hand pulls me into the dark, the voice whispering to me secret things.  Things so secret, they defy expression.  All the locked closets of my childhood vanish into an unending backstage where the hand and the voice feed the fox in me.

The secrets it speaks take the shape of a salt-field, a fire in the distance, wind bone-sharp on the skin; words like blanch and scar and thresh; the tightening of the glottal muscles before crying.

These shapes become a name in the dark, and the name becomes not a person, but a promise.

Bradley.

Flatlands

I become the tallest point on the smoke-field for miles and miles, knowing I am made of copper, knowing the storm is coming.

I acquaint myself with the dirt with the timid fingers of a virgin.  The tree comes out in small movements, which I am motionless to watch.  When the dawn comes, it blooms fire, and ticks like a clock.

I think all my prayers are made growing something which will ultimately be used to destroy (like Brad, that was Brad). It has to be that way, so I can bleed, and bleed, and bleed, and bleed.

Letters 1

Adam,

Over the amber flame of your eyes, we join hands for this seance where you will explain for the first time, and possibly the last time, this dormancy.  As things born without names, inside the other, we began life nebulous and strangely-defined, like shadows.  When did you know me and when did I know you?  It really wouldn't ever matter, until this moment, when I'm asking you with a certain fierceness to tell me so I can let this run through me, finally.

We would do well to make this a collection of our letters, I know, and have always known.  But what I want is

Evelyn,

I can remember as a child, watching the television which was running a nature program narrated by a voice I know you sometimes hear in your head, a man's voice, with infinite patience, iterating to my prepubescent self that it is both natural, and mammalian, for mothers to let the weakest offspring die.  If I was aware of you then, it was as a dark force beyond my comprehension; a cabal to which only the most dubious of my acquaintances belonged.

I have a memory of which I've never spoken, of the first instance I watched my mother shield me from the fists of my father.  He had been aiming no necessarily for me, but I had been in the way, heedless as any toddler, not understanding that his jibes had become malicious and whatever game we'd been playing had become an entrapment.  My mother moved her slight body with a swift motion to stand between us, and if she'd had a fire-poker on hand, I know I would've grown up an only child.

In the ensuing years, I would watch him, or something only hear him, elicit from her throat the meek whimper of her submission, but on this day, she growled low and animal, and I feared - reptilian, possibly, from primordial sections of my developing mind - that if I fell behind, I would be devoured by her, as surely as he would.

Adam,

There could have only ever been the pain.  Confusion, humiliation.  I can't face what I've done, any more than I can face what I am.  I'm methodical in this rage, and always was.  Was this surviving?  No, you don't understand that the mother leaves her offspring to die, yes, but most especially, when trapped, she will devour her own limbs to escape.

Evelyn,

Terrariums are an interesting concept, much like ant farms: a habitat designed to sustain itself, in an isolated microcosm.  I believe the knowledge it can work in science is partially the reason I tried to enact it in life.

Art, it is wondered, can imitate life and vice versa, but I wonder if the same could be said for science.  Does science (the pure experiment) somehow capture the pure experience?

Adam,

I want to be taken away, is the problem.  You don't understand, or couldn't, that I want to be taken on the wave of something which matters and makes the rest of the world dim.  I want there to be a diminishment of sound, to a dark place where the mechanics of things are understood in a simplistic way.

All this might be attributable to a desire I have to get back to the garden. 

Eve,
I've begun to arrange my thoughts, by color.  Softest is where I find you, hiding beneath a green both secret and muted.  Let me find it for you.

#5F956E

Adam,

Every time I feel like I'm onto something, a stray wind comes to shatter the cobwebs and I wonder if perhaps nothing is gentle enough, or soft enough, to contribute to the perfect den in which I can touch old parts of me which have retreated far below the surface.  I was going to ask you to do it, but the song changed, and

There's No Earthly Way of Knowing 4

The night after Rosie and Drama blinded Grady, we decided to go for a ride. 

Grady accepted the blinding with grace; something not all men can do.  When he came to without his sight, he laid in bed for a period of time just listening to the house around him.  We decided to go for a ride because he had planned one, regardless, and being now blind wouldn't stop him from it.

He invited Rosie because she was the one who'd taken his sight, and because he loved her, and because she wanted to go.  Brad and Clyde and I invited ourselves because it was the first time anything had happened to us, our small and inconsequential biker gang, which facilitated our riding together in a way that fit the character we'd chosen for ourselves as a gang.  If we ever went before, there would be insincere carousing, wheelies popped in posing jest of ourselves and none of us could stand it, really, so we just didn't go.

Roziac

There's No Earthly Way of Knowing 3

If I could choose Adam's name all over again, I would name him Blunt Force Trauma.  In the middle of everything, he interrupts me.  He does it repeatedly and viscerally, like he can remind me of where I came from by beating me to death with the bricks of the house we grew up in, caving into smeared tissue the places in my brain which forgot him.

"I'm not a careful man, Evelyn," he reminds me, removing his glasses and folding them into the breast pocket of his shirt with fingers so many people seem to forget are roughly calloused, even me.  He plays a professor very well, it's true.  He dons without effort the mantle of soft collegiate intellectual, but when it comes to any of the Gray boys, all their efforts at civilizing stop at the hands, each pair battered and scarred like teenage warlords.  I've written too much about each of their hands, and the secrets they betray of how these boys have grown consequently into men who fight, who vandalize, who commit murder, break down doors, and crash cars.

And so he crashes one into me, when he interrupts me to say, "Come home, Evelyn."

I can never remember what I was doing before.  So all statements of will turn into magic spells.

The lights in Adam's room are low, his door partially ajar.  I close it when I enter.  His curio cabinets glow with exhibition lighting cast over deformed animal bones and antique tattoo guns.  I resist his interruptions like I resist anything else I think will affect me inside, and I enter his room a nonchalant boy, immune to charms and dense to nuance.

"I forgot I was going to bring you another penis cage I found," I tell him, diminishing his deep reverence to the history of human sexuality with a fast kick to his sandcastle.

"Goody," he dismisses, because he knows both the mood I'm in and the boy it engenders. 

Adam has been clean-shaven and crew-cut since Brad has abandoned the notion of grooming over a year ago.  While Brad wilted, Adam starched.  Because if he can't give me what I want, he can provide for me it's contrast, and does so with adept innuendo and crisp accuracy.

"Your new deodorant has an almost mildew scent," he adds, "which I enjoy quite a bit."

"That's disgusting," I snap as I cross to the wardrobe where he's relegated my clothes. 

"No, it's very pleasant.  Like all the leaves of you, have fallen for the year."

Inside the wardrobe, there are t-shirts and jeans on one side, dresses on the other, sweaters in the middle.  Adam's arranged my clothes by gender and preference, with items of safety in between.  The gesture dissolves my resentment toward him in an instant - the manner in which he understands.

The first night we had sex, I wore my favorite white dress to see him, which ended the night discarded on the floor.  Since then, I've seen it haunting the corners of his closets; a secret I've been determined to let him keep.  It was a year ago or so when I found it in the lab, a 6-inch square excised from it near the hem.  The straps of it peer out from the back of the wardrobe, shrugging their wooden hanger. 

I put on a shirt I found on the boy side, faded black and waving the flag of torn pocket over the breast, and we went to bed together.  He was gone when I woke up, but I resolved to repay him with the trespass of rearranging his closet similarly, in a way he'd like but never consider himself: by the texture of the clothing.

For Tigerlily

Tigerlily,

Across the bathroom tiles, I've spread this memory, liquefied.  You told me once you were taught to shave, and even if you never were, you were.  We were.  We were taught how to give voice to this color-secret, the liquid truth, in long equations of additions and subtractions.

I cut.  My hair.

And it was a tragedy.

The scissors were my mother's, engraved with her name, and so it was in her name that I did it.  I parceled it into long offerings which poured bleak onto the tiled floor.  Subtraction, in these many hateful inches.

I wished I could have remained a Lost Boy, but Peter promised.  He promised to love us all through the hardships of first living as a hatchet-limbed boy of little speech, then changing in these grotesque inches into the wicked banishment of girlhood.

I cried, I remember.  I hyperventilated in the bathroom while he picked over his collection of Hustler and Playboy and drew the ubiquitous florals sufficiently labian.  I took the scissors, and cut my hair, squealing I don't want to die I don't want to die, and Peter was calm.  He was so calm, like he knew.  He let the inches fall, and we watched the pile for a long time without saying anything, like it was a pit of living snakes.

"It'll only hurt a little, Tig," he said to me, and his shadow nodded.

Peter always keeps his promises, through the broken ankle-straps and haphazard nail polish.  He loved us through each blunt scissor-stroke and rage of lace and ribbon.  We learned to shave, and then we stopped because he took us to the hotel together, and left us there without anything we could use to hurt ourselves.  The blossom expands, and then curls into itself.  Like detox.

He left us there, he said, until we could figure how to fly again.

-Tigerlily

There's No Earthly Way of Knowing 2

Matthew unfolded, tricks up his sleeves which he emptied as he walked over the water-soaked floors.  He unfolded like a creature of many legs, his green eyes blank and sane as cicadas.  This torment, the torment of the flood and our subsequent apathy toward all it's related chaos, was the circumstance which called him to action; the way we all struggled in his invisible web.

Matthew crept, spreading over doorknobs and into cracks in the tile in the bathroom the paranoia of purpose.  We are dark creatures when provoked to dark places, and in idleness Matthew itches us to look inward, find patterns in nothingness, blame each other, and form alliances with forces we'd never bother with on normal nights.  Where he walked after the flood, he spread a thick and dangerous magic that we all needed, as much as we all hated it.

Maybe he saved us all, who really knows?  Maybe it was only me.

I pride myself on being some kind of hero, though after the last 5 years, I'd struggle to come up with anything I've done which was heroic at the time and not totally in my own self-interest (if the two are even mutually exclusive, which I can't say anymore).  My old belief is that I'm the hero, and Matthew is the villain, for all the ways he walks around moral absolutes and maintains his innocence of heart.  Wouldn't it be strange if he'd done something to save us all?  Would it have been an accident, or would he have had the intention to do it?

It was simple, or it began simply.  He wrote me a letter, and so peeling off one of his thousand tattoos and laying it flat and loving onto paper, he was coy and apologetic for that which had come before.  It was a clever and incisive "good morning," but villains are like that.  They have the ability to make idle chit-chat into weaponry and drive it straight into the heart of all things. 

Eve,

The fountain is a kiddie pool. You had already known that. Everyone had known though no one had returned any rubber duckies to it. Well, I dove in. The water we said we would never touch. I found Jamaica.

There's no more half-assed evil spirits in here, only prefabricated ones and the last bit of patience you could stuff into your pockets. I said I wanted your eyes. This, this, this, over again, but never round like the button holes you had me put my tongue through to kiss you. 

Meager though we are, meager though we can't. Her palms blister, and then I accuse her of becoming you. Daughters are like water. 

This was the rain, dripping down the boots of some who had not known rain before. There were bells in the river. An ocean could not rise to match the fire or be brave enough to put it out. Though it was like something out of one of those darker teen movies such as that which all the actors were former models anyways. I hate when it has gotten dark when leaving the theater when it had been day when we went inside.

Turn when you can hear me speaking to you, will you? I hate when you cannot look into my eyes. Circle, circle follow circle, circle. I never got to show you my hand, and you never believed it was a winner. 

Though you were confused by me and hurt by me, you let me make you laugh, and you made me laugh. Why do you let yourself do that? How can you let yourself? I want you to teach me how to do it, but also I want to kill you for knowing how to do that as well. Fuck that.

I got a new job, I am going to be a crash test dummy. I had thought of asking you not to laugh at me for this. Is there a point? You have a new job as a gas giant which admits noxious, destructive chemicals which kill. I am going to dry off. I am going to paint with all colors which are edging to pink though they aren't pink. It is the colors of Venus, appearing pink though they are altogether not. If I had not rushed off to become a fighter as early in my life, I would have become better with colors and made my own paint to sell and called them Pink Planette. But now I am to resort to test dummying. Goodbye forever.

I love you, Eve.

MBK

Dream 7/24/19

Brad,

We tiptoed around dusty crates at the attraction, perhaps a carnival or hidden market, the light indicative of a secret withheld.  Brown bottle glass, antique mirrors.  I would have forgotten your name, if it was one you'd ever told me.

There was so much life that happened to me before I realized I could distill this down to the single sentence: we fucked on the couch and it my first time.  I, as usual, wish I had saved some of that life so there could be more understanding of the process, but maybe the process doesn't matter, and didn't matter even then.

I knew it was a memory, but at the time I knew that ironically, like growing a new memory over the old ones I was handed by circumstance is a terribly passe thing these days and can be ignored as easily as refusing to acknowledge anymore remixes.  Maybe the process is just as easily summed up by saying it's the same song, but different.

This could've been a poem if I was a different part of myself - the part maybe that sees poetry as a weapon instead of the pattering mortar of words which feels like an arsenal but ultimately moves little.  If you push me around, I'll move.  Justified down to the last pawn on the board; if you push me around, I'll move.

I'm mad because the dream happened, and like anything else, it makes sense only after the fact and maybe 20 years before, but no time in between.  And I loved you.

No, that isn't what I was going to say.  I was going to say I kept the love I felt for you a secret from everyone, and that's why we were never going to be together.  I can never tell when I'm talking about you or thinking about you, if anything I think or feel is real.  I don't know how this part of me works, and being close to you at all means I have a whole other half I might use to undermine it in the first place.  I think this whole thing could be really funny if I wanted it to be, but I don't.

I don't know what to do with this slice of time anymore, not after I beat it to death to analyze where everything turned from good to bad.  Not after I discovered I could never be a princess for you, accepted that forever, donned pair after pair of thigh-high fishnets to spite you, tried to grow up without you, felt like such a fucking disappointment to you, refused to ever trust you, cursed you loudly and often, only to wake up, Brad, to fucking wake up in the ash after the blast because you kissed me and a thousand years had gone by in the blink of your slick         red            time machine.

I wanted to be angry with you for this distinctly adamic maneuver, tying something up in me with a bow to present it back to myself like what's been in your pocket for the last 20 years was this puzzle piece.  I wanted to be angry but at the same time, I was too relieved.  Relieved that you had it, and relieved that you had it. 

I can't remember really how we got here, except we fell in love the other night, and it felt like something unrelenting colliding with something unwarranted.  So I find myself under you again, tangling into your hair, begging you not to stop again and forgetting what the both of us have always known.

I loved fucking you the first time because I could feel how my body belonged to you and no one else.  It feels like that every time since.

I can't remember how we got here, but the slide passes from one side of the carousel to the other with a metallic sound, pushing one photograph over in favor of the next.  Once, we were at summer camp, once we were orphaned killers, once we were newlyweds absconded from the law, once you took me to see how the world began, and now this.  Now this, we lay on the grass in borrowed clothes and wonder what just happened to us.

But we couldn't know all the attendees of the wedding would be vaporized the next day in the power of the blast of the house exiting this atmosphere.  We couldn't know it was their graves you picked through to propose.  We couldn't know what it would take to marry my heart to yours, being unflaggingly the same. 

I have to tell you, I lied to you so much when we were young because I was afraid of meaning the things I said.  I promise I'll never lie to you again.

Love always,

Janet

There's No Earthly Way of Knowing 1

In a way I imagine to be similar to the unwinding of a galaxy from a center point of creation, the house unwinds into things which could never contain it as we drive it onward with the elastic recompenses of our imaginations.  The front lawn, the battlefield, the site of the Wilkes' barbecue, the Radley's front porch, Dracula's drawbridge, and I don't give a damn.  I passed a hundred bodies on my way up the front drive and into my home tonight, all casualties of these close quarters I share with this pack of bloodthirsty animals, and I didn't see them at all because I choose not to see.

The swamp has absorbed all our bloodshed and lost hopes and dreams, and when it became saturated, it spat them back at us as the water overflowed the first floor and the hurricane raged outside.  Maybe every storm has been a result of our unnumbered transgressions against god, order, and creation. 

Gray House has a garage.  I say that limply, to explain why all our cars are sitting on the lawn, or convince myself of some last vestige of humanity we've delayed in shedding out of sentimentality.  We have a garage, and there are tools in it, and old boxes of things we've been meaning to throw out or tried to keep for too long. 

The garage is large and unfinished with any drywall.  The wood beams are home to spiders and the corpses of insects.  Grady has three or four motorcycles in various stages of rebuilding housed there, and it looks, no matter how long it takes him to get back to it, like he's only just left the room.  I think when he dies, this will be where we go to mourn him. 

Adam, having completed the restoration of his own car 4 years ago, has begun work on the repair of John's rust-colored truck, which has refused to turn over since the day he came home.  Adam and Grady have eyed the thing with suspicious glares, like it's alive and purposely defying them.  The cement floor is generally grimy, generally cool, and growing moss in the corner closest the door.

But if I go to it now - if I cross the threshold of the place from the laundry room off the library on the first floor - and open the heavy steel door and expect to see this dim workshop before me, I know I won't.  What will meet me is something a hundred times less expected and a thousand times more heartbreaking.  Gray House will betray me, and become Joshua's garage if I look there. 

I know from the moment I open the door, the smell of the air which greets me is no longer bayou damp and summer stale.  It's winter in the Midwest.  The smell of American misery, like piles of wet chaff left to freeze.  It's the winter of 1973, and somehow, that is also on the edges of the air, as part of the misery; that which we despise and cannot yet change about our world and ourselves, and perhaps wouldn't, even given the chance.

Joshua's smell slaps me just beyond that - first of his hair and the soap he uses to shampoo it's twelve or so inches, and then the sweat he drips in working on the Plymouth he has on the lift.  In this place, Joshua is the biggest creature in existence to me, and my world is comprised of this garage, flavored with his beer and smoke breaks with the garage boys, and blanketed in his vast checkered shirts.  From this doorway, it's a hundred miles up to his shoulders where he carries me, to see the secret world above our ceiling fans in our apartment upstairs.

"Bug?" his voice calls, from this somewhere else.  "You find it?"

I don't know what he wants me to find, there, or even if I'm allowed in the garage now that's it's night and we've closed.  Maybe the sink is leaking and I just can't remember.  Maybe I'm about to get in trouble for sneaking around for the first time.  Here in the doorway, I can see with some kind of diamond clarity this one thought which dooms me always in that world: It would take a man even bigger than Joshua to...

I close the door.

Welcome Home

Rosie,

There is no sound quite like the sound of the two of us crashing our house into the side of a world we don't understand.  It makes a ripple in a flat pond, breaking hot the glass of our globe, smashing the fruit stall to wooden pulp, pushing little mountains up where the tension became to great.

Clyde split his lip, and threw Punkinbucket into reverse hard enough to ruin the gearbox and decimate the transmission because he likes to be part of the choir.  That must've been why he peeled out of the parking lot of our apartment the other day - so we'd know the smell of him ejecting from a reality.  Burning, summery, black, dragon.

He does all these stupid things for love.

I don't know how many times we've made this sound, and I don't know how many times Clyde's ruined that fucking car.  I don't know, and have never known, where the beginning of our lives ought to be, or when to stop, or the point enough becomes enough.  I don't know those things, and I've had occasion over the last year to turn that distinctly dragon trait into an angelic one.

See, I used to be afraid of the ash that falls in place of a belief in magic when you've given excuse after excuse after excuse (and by you in this example, I obviously mean me).  Where things run out.  Where hearts give out.  Where my hypocrisy bends over backward to your isolation.  Scars run the length of the Wasteland we built, moved into, celebrated, inhabited, and ultimately mapped by finding the edges which border it lined with living fur and the sound of Adam's laugh.

You know, the things which are the same as pigs flying.

I can feel you right now, even though this is hours or possibly days before you'll set your eyes on this letter, wondering who I am talking to you, and writing these expressions that you find boyish and possibly even a fumbling attempt to be charming or anticipate your reaction.

We got good at doing those things, while we were at war in the Wasteland.  Reading our facets of self that prism rapid and unstoppable, as good as we got at freezing them to non-existence.  Traversing places of lost time and meaning, fast as a Rolodex and just as obsolete, we flipped past that which we didn't want to see as if we were skipping whole sections of a book we've already read or a movie we've already seen to find out if we could push the tape just a little bit further this time, and let the pages fill in themselves again.

I used to be afraid of those scars, coated light with the falling snow of a detonated bomb that was Brad's handiwork; his final and cynical contribution when his eyes cloud the same as Matthew's.  I'm not now because I can see there is no difference in this place or any other.  We're together, where the magic is collecting like rocks in water, and our perseverance in beliefs doesn't matter.

It's easy n

Hey.

It's easy now, Mercy.  I can move my shoulder upward in an idle stretch and stare down the giddy prom-night couple across from us on the M.  It's easy and it's fast and I can shed this shit I don't care about and we can understand one another again.  It would've scared me once, but it doesn't now.

We can touch a hundred ways, and it's easy now, as much as it was easy for you to turn to waterfall into Tinkerbell and wait with your arms crossed for my fucking applause.

When I give it to you, it's with the sole intention of wiping out all which came before this moment, in an attempt to give you everything I have within me.  You, and just you.  I have a war name for you.  I have a cold rag for you.  I have an idea to make this better.  I have a stick of gum in my pocket.  I have a way out.  I have a way in.  I have nothing.  I have something.

Somewhere, an old war is being waged between right and wrong.  Dylan and Brenda are breaking up again.  Angels dance on pinheads, and little girls get ripped from nightmares with vicious claws.

Adam descends the basement stairs, Brad resumes his work on a song, Clyde examines the metal contraption he's built in the backyard, Dean executes a pirouette in the dance studio, Drama hits his teeth with the butt of a ballpoint pen, Grady dips his hands into black water near the swamp, John rolls over and covers his ears, Joshua responds to a text, Matthew pours his coffee onto the tracks, Nick throws his shoes into the corner.

Nothing preceded this moment.  Nothing.

Hello, I love you, welcome home.

Adam,

My body moves roughshod over John's in summer darkness; the absolute stillness of night we wait for to break the heat. With mute and terrified abandon, I knot my fingers around the frayed hem of his shirt and ball the worn cotton into my fists. His eyes shift dim and close again as he sweeps the corners of the room like someone will see. We crash-land in the Greenhouse with dust in our hair, plywood boards clattering the brickwork, like we'd come through the ceiling. Whatever happens now is known only to the wide and glossy leaves which shadow us from the eyes of others.

My body has forgotten the words, and you return them to me in small, unnoticed applications of pressure. Every hanging note of you in the air travels to a tiny chamber in my cells and grows to a venomous longing, and the venom holds the words, which are leached from me when we touch.

I watch you sing to the bees in the morning, your hair loose from sleep and freed from it's styled summer prison. I watch through the pane of turquoise glass that turns the color of your skin weak green, the back of your neck flashing above your collar like moss growing from fresh soil. 

Against the same soil in the dark, you lose a fight for balance, not with gravity, but in yourself.  You pull me down to meet you so the dry black crumbles warm my shins in your lap when you lift my nightgown away and ponder with careful fingers this hole inside me.

As much as we were Cartwrights, adopted by our parents at an early age, we were also feral children, perhaps left behind at the Hathaway House. I am as much a fox as I am a girl when you find me at night, and I follow you across the lawn, and the shine of the moon on your shoes.

So I wanted to tell you, I know this man you are now taught me to read and write.

Adam in the Greenhouse

Last night, Brad was busy and so I went to the greenhouse because Adam told me he'd been decorating and wanted to show me something.

Wanted to show me something.  It took everything in me not to roll my eyes when he said it to me, because we both knew I'd be looking around the greenhouse for maybe 20 collective seconds before he'd ask me if I wanted to take a shower, and then... well, the last time he'd invited me to see his new pink cactus, we'd ended up fucking on one of the metal and wire tables that run along the walls, and had knocked down one of his priceless orchids.

The smell of wet terra cotta is something I love enough to have requested Adam build me a shower in my bedroom with clay tile.  He'd compromised with me and put it in the greenhouse, if only for the reason he had better occasion to watch me there, while he was working.  The brick ground is always warm from the sun, and the green garden hose he leaves unwound always leaking like a runny nose when you step on it.

The white doors at the far end of the library all shuttered closed shine yellow through their pink-frosted glass windows.  I pass Brad on the way to the greenhouse, waiting for the seance to take place.  I pass Jack, too, but I just give them a wave because I'm mad Brad wants to have a seance and not tell me about the fucking hotel room I've been trapped in for a day and a half.

I pull open one of the 4 french doors that lead to the greenhouse.  Damp and warm air greets me that is the same temperature and humidity as my bedroom.  It's green and bright inside, but the glass walls lead out into the dark swamp lit with a sliver of a moon.

I see he has indeed redecorated.

What used to be a relatively normal greenhouse with labels on herbs and an apothecary cabinet for dried samples and seeds is now crammed with old table lamps, and antiques.  At the entrance of the French doors, there is a kneeling greyhound statue with a sign around it's neck which says WELCOME.

He is crouched over a sample of green leaves, his shirt rolled to the sleeve and unbuttoned enough to expose the necessity of his throat beyond the idiosyncrasy of his tie, loosened to a weak knot, swinging brown before him in shadows.

"Evelyn," he mutters to the leaves.

"Adam," I mention to the greyhound.

A low-placed antique Tiffany lamp sits next to the shower.  He doesn't look up when I undress or climb inside it, to turn on the faucet.  I see he's installed shelves along the wall, where he's placed some plants that need less sun and more water.

I wash my hair with the things he's left in the shower; all bottles with hand-made labels warped and smeared by the water to an illegible purple stain over the white paper on the brown glass.  I can hear him outside the shower stall, humming to himself.

We fall into this slow place easily, as if the shorthand of it were embedded in our DNA, and maybe it is.  The simple truth is, maybe this is our bedroom, and always was to some degree.

When I turn off the water and open the door, he is absently holding out a towel to me, parts of it snagged to long strings of loose terrycloth.  It's rust-brown.  I dry off in the heat, and put my dress back on before he acknowledges me at all beyond my name, when I sit down on a low shelf.

"Hello," he says, his voice soft as he removes the black horn-rimmed glasses he wears when he's studying.  The stool he sits on creaks soft the wear of the leather.

"Hey," I tell him, and he smiles.  Adam's smiles are so few and fleeting, I forget to do it back when I'm taken by surprise at one's arrival.

"Do you like it?" he asks me, gesturing to the room around us, and I nod.

"It's very pretty."

He looks around, something on his face almost like pride or accomplishment.

"I thought you would like it, when I was doing it.  I thought... well, I thought about how we would make love, here."

His brown eyes settle on my legs under my dress.

"Do you think it's romantic?" he asks me.

"Yes, very," I tell him.

The smile is back, although now tinged with something darker, and he sets his glasses aside before swiveling the stool back to face me.

"Would you like to make love, Evelyn?" he asks me, and I nod again.

We lay on the warm brick without speaking.  I feel when he kisses me that this is something married people do; they build one another surprise rooms to make love inside.  Some of the water from the hose leaks into the back of my hair.  Adam scrapes his knee on the brick.  He shudders when I pull his hair.

We fall asleep on the ground, there, using my dress for a blanket.  I dream of him tattooing me with a heart on my arm, anatomically perfect and labeled.

Ian 60

Ian,

In the fallow trees there is a silence of the thin air, through which there is silk idly waving and I pull it back from my face.

In the black heart of the woods which have been destroyed, embers keep the trunks warm and they pale and crumble backward from my touch.

The world unmade, and the bomb detonated, I am in two worlds which create duplicity and confusion.

I am a new spring.  I am touching the tender greens with pale fingers.  I feel the birds moving fast and empty eyes.  I remember Adam's names.

I am... decimated.  I am destroyed.  I am in Hell.  I have stitched the desert to the cells which created it and erased all I am inside by fire and refused to return it again to whatever beauty anyone ever saw in it.  I'm not a ruin, and would never be a ruin, and I have made myself simply not exist but for a scar along the edge of the desert sand.  I have unmade Eve and denied myself the rebirth.  I'm a waste.

But I had no reason to, and I'm happy here, and I am carefully trying to...

Trying to find the smallest reasons in the shallows of the river, rounded like fish eyes, to hold close to me and tell me the things we're meant to be doing.  It all could've been swimming there, in the river, forever, and I stopped watching because I was distracted and my quiet days of watching became lonely days of having nothing to watch.

I want to swallow the heart of this unmitigated rage.  I want to murder myself the way a stranger would, because it isn't enough to just die.  I want to be erased completely and washed away.  I don't want my bones to live on, but I want to stop existing.

You drew up from inside me some girl I no longer feel I'm capable of being - your twin.  But I am her, even right now, and why I feel I'm not her is because I don't understand who I should continue to be.  I don't understand the limitations of her, and if they're mine.  I just don't know who I am, and haven't for months.

I don't know... what the fuck... I'm even capable of.  And it's this idea that makes me feel both alive and dead at the same time.  That maybe I've surpassed myself, or failed us all, and I can't find my way back to my self-righteousness which would allow me to prove that I'm not a waste of time.

And Annik's reasons are that if I have to work so hard to prove I'm not, then to leave her alone and let her just be one.  Because there is too much at stake for her which she can't lose; my voice of all things.  Of all the fucking things, isn't she the one who is worth it to stop this need to change into the long-awaited butterfly we doubt so much the existence of?

To just stop trying to be and be.  To just stop trying to be and be.  I want to cut out my heart.  I don't know who I am.  You would only ever give me one answer.

I can't reach for anything inside myself to make anything I am feeling or saying make sense, except for you.  There's a lamp in the warehouse.  Did I push it over, or did I change the bulb?  Is it cold or hot?  Did I leave or did we stay?  Is there anything here but nonsense?

Torn in half,

Annik

Thoughts About John

John-

Valentine

Sophia

Augustina

Elsie

Georgia

Alice

Shiloh

Juniper

Hesperus

Coney Island 5

Brad left a Valentine's Day gift for me under the bumper cars.  A red music box, filled with a necklace and other things he'd probably found at the bottom of his pockets.  The necklace had 3 lockets attached to the chain, with room for six photos.  I wore it into the tunnel, where he'd tried to wrap it around his fingers while we kissed.

Outside the Tunnel of Love, Clyde was waiting for me as the storm came in off the Atlantic.  The night sky purpled to an unnatural color and the clouds flashed with occasional high lightning.  I knew he was meeting Rosie for their own secret rituals tonight, which is why he was wearing black.  Clyde might let a green or blue t-shirt into his rotation now and then, but when he's going to see Rosie, he wears the plain and faded black of their misspent youth.  His hair blew around in the cool air, like it always does, hiding his black eyes.

I can never decide if I've had the fewest conversations with Clyde, or the most, out of anyone else alive.  But it's the same as trying to decide that about myself.  Have I really spoken back to the voice I call my conscience, or have I never done so?  Thoughts don't narrate themselves any more than they are formed by language, but instead something more primitive like a collection of the senses.  The same goes for Clyde, as the boy who knows all and sees all.  Is he that way because I told him everything, or showed him?  Or did it just happen like a thought happens, to both of us at once?

Clyde stood on the beach, a black shape against the eerie purple storm and the gray berm of sand.  He didn't say he was waiting for me, but I knew that he was.  I didn't tell him I would come down the to the sand, but he knew I would.  The dim light reflected down on all of Coney Island casting it in shades of black and gray and violet, and the wind filled the atmosphere with an expectation of something terrible approaching.  The park was empty, but for us.

"I'll be right back," I told Brad, and he crossed his arms and leaned against the metal railing outside the ride, clad in his white thermal shirt and red baseball cap.  He squinted at me in jealousy, every inch the good ole boy we all know he can become.

"Alright, but don't take too long because we gotta get goin' an' we got stuff to do."

Behind him, emerging from the Tunnel with Nick wilting delicate under his arm, Adam threw me black glower.  His tie was undone and his fly was down, so I had a hard time feeling that sorry for him. 

"I need to speak with you, Evelyn," he accused me, the tone is his voice plainly implying I was avoiding him.

"I'm just going to say hi to Clyde," I shrugged, as if both of them were overreacting and there was nothing dangerous at all about Clyde; no dimensions we could vanish into, no memory spells he could cast to erase both Brad and Adam from existence entirely, no sexual prowess he possessed which they did not.

"Well, we'll wait here," Adam grunted, his heavy brows meeting over his eyes as he leaned against the same railing Brad had his weight against, Brad taller by an inch and a half, Adam stiffer by 10 degrees.  Nick stole away, judiciously silent and sparing me his sarcasm.

I met Clyde on the beach, and I've written what we discussed a few times now, at first descriptive passages explaining all the things his double-speak meant, and then a version which explained none of it, and I finally distilled it down to just our dialogue.  It would have made a good blog entry and provided a nice natural break in events.

But the words he said don't matter.  Or anyway, they wouldn't now, or in their translation.  Like anything Clyde says, they'll matter little by little, over time, a second too late.

We talked about love.  That's all he ever talks about.  At the end of the conversation, he smiled at me.  Clyde's smile is really more of a humorless grin on a skeleton where only his eyes get soft.  I knew when he smiled, something terrible was about to happen, and the beach disappeared, and I was lost in the desert without warning, and alone.

"It's supposed to remind people of a pussy," Joshua explains to me, and I roll my eyes.

"It is not."

Joshua takes every available inch of the benches along the beach at Coney.  The canvas of his jeans always looks tortured to it's limit as he stretches his wide legs apart to make room for his stomach on his lap.  His wide face is unshaven, and his hair is long enough and tangled with wild curls enough he's tied it back like a pirate.  The buttons of his flannel strain, and the sunlight is pulled thin through the clouds, and the entire moment is drawn long to contain his size.

Joshua is really big, and he laughs really loud at my embarrassment.

"It's called the Tunnel of Love," he reiterates to me, like I'll suddenly believe his point or even want to acknowledge it.  "It's all dark and there's water and it's really warm and damp cuz I put in those fog machines."

"But I mean... that's not like why they were invented," I argue, and his laugh echoes along the beach.

"Yes it is!"

I try and fail to squish beside him against the armrest of the bench and end up leaning against his shoulder and sitting halfway on his knee.  Sometimes I think Joshua's main accomplishment with his size was taking up available space so girls would have to sit on his lap.

"You're too fat to fit here," he teases me, and gently pinches me along the ribs.

"Okay, but is it like X-rated?" I ask him, and I feel him breathe deep and sigh with disappointment.

"No.  I thought about it, though.  Just making the inside a lot of porn."

"Why didn't you?"

He considers before answering me, touching his lips again.

"I thought it would be weird to pose all those animatronics like that.  What if I like it?  Does that make me a pervert?"

"Yes," I tell him, and poke him back in the gut.

"It's called Love Through the Ages.  You'll like it," he promises me.  "And the mauve is nice.  It's like a really classy mauve."

"It's pussy-mauve," I remind him.

Coney Island 4

The morning of Valentine's Day in Coney Island was tense with plans.  Valentine's Day is Joshua's favorite holiday, and so when we woke up, it was to a cotton-candy sky the color of pink champagne, and while he denied it, we all knew it was on purpose.

He bounded around from person to person, casting his huge shadow and letting us all know, "I re-did the Tunnel of Love!  You have to bring your Valentine!"

To which the members of the House all began to eye one another suspiciously.  While no one would mind any random pairings, really, there was a certain urgency to not be the last two picked.  Glances were made sidelong, assumptions made, and arrangements quietly finalized.

While Valentine is maybe synonymous most days with sweetheart, to John and Brad and me, it has a different meaning which takes on a more sinister pall.  It's the same as murderer or mercenary, and it's a secret name we call each other.  I first whispered it into Brad's ear just after Joshua left for the last time.

Everything was dark and painful and hopeless, and Brad's eyes were cold and distant, and he kept smiling at me as if we were stranded in the most romantic place he could think of.  He started wearing black that winter, and he stole a red leather jacket from a women's Macy's.  The winter we divorced.  I whispered "Valentine," into his ear while we fucked on frozen ground in the literal middle of Nowhere.

"Because he steals hearts," Rosie agreed with me, her hands folded patient in her lap.

But Clyde's always called me Valentine.  And because it's Clyde, he's never explained why, except to give me a poetic impression that it's because I'm every wolf's favorite food.

Everyone knows about Clyde and me, and everyone knows that Adam and I were married on Valentine's Day, and everyone knows that the killer in Brad is named Valentine, and everyone knows the killer in John is named Valentine, and everyone knew that this Valentine's Day, Brad had asked me to be his.  So it wasn't any surprise when Joshua announced to us all to choose our Valentines, and everyone broke eye contact with me like they were afraid I was going to call on them.

"You're gonna go to the Tunnel with me, right Evie?" Brad muttered, unromantic and uncertain at seven in the morning.

"Yeah," I agreed with him, as brightly as I could, while I Adam rolled his eyes into his morning coffee at the picnic tables near the boardwalk.

"Yes, just pencil our wedding in anywhere," he growled, and stalked off to make his own date.

Not all the glances made sidelong at the other members of Gray House were romantic.  Some were friendly and some were murderous and some were curious.  Joshua encouraged us all morning to express whatever kind of love we wanted to, and everyone saw Matthew's smile get more and more twisted the more he considered the idea.

He managed to catch Dean's eye and Dean blushed to a deep reddish-purple.

Drama lined his mouth heavy with red lipstick into a cupid's bow to kiss Joshua's cheek.

Rosie and I decided to gift everyone a Valentine's Day music box with a special song inside.

Nick made shy advances toward everyone, part of a kind of Yom Kippur he engages in yearly, turning valentines into apologies.

Drama started saving love songs on his computer for a comeback Radio Nowhere.

The morning unwound, slowly and as we expected it to.

Wave after wave.

Under the pink clouds.

Until Grady began to cry.

It started quietly at first.  I'm sure only John heard, tying his boots at the foot of the cot he and Grady had slept in, having fallen asleep over whiskey and an olive green model Indian.  I'm sure John felt the same chill the rest of us feel when a child dies and they meet the Nowhere Man at the Crossroads.

"There, now," I"m sure John whispered in the dim light of Grady's store front.  "There, there, now, it's all right now."

And I'm sure Grady, both present in Coney Island and at the dirt crossing of the dead, would've responded to John in Spanish, calling him the word for Gravedigger, and told him students were dying.

"It's at his home," Clyde told me, approaching from the ski-ball arcade.  He looked dirty enough to be homeless, and thoughtfully drew a clean streak on his cheek with a finger wet in his mouth; the universal symbol for tears.

"What is?" I asked him.  "Whose home?"

"Ladybird, Ladybird," he whispered, sitting down next to me on the picnic bench.

"Fly away home?" I asked him, and he nodded, his dark hair hanging like a curtain between us.

Your house is on fire, your children are gone, I finished the rest of the rhyme in my thoughts.

"Heh," Clyde chuffed from behind his hair.  He smelled like salt ground into filthy clothes, and the slow fade of mildew from somewhere now exposed to the air.  He turned his head to look at me through mats of hair, tangled and coarse with seawater.  I could see through gaps in the strings his two black eyes.

"Hey.  Fox.  Can you dig it?"

The first reports of the Parkland shooting came through a few minutes later the way anything comes in from the "real" world.  Like my mom yelling at me to do the dishes in the middle of a hard level.  Like the morning alarm going off.  Like the jolt in my veins of adrenaline reminding me that I'm alive and that is a terribly temporary state.

I should take this moment to say that despite appearances, the politics of Gray House differ wildly, and we make room for all kinds of contradictions of circumstance and spirit.  No one has to be any one thing, and so we aren't ever really one thing.  What happened that morning has been editorialized and commented on and disputed and even wholly refuted, by us and the world at large.  But in the moment that it happened, we all shared the same opinion, which was that we prefer living children to dead ones.

Grady and Clyde know the most about the dead, and so it's them who conspire over school bus accidents, church shootings, casualties of war, and victims of abuse.  It's them who get tired the fastest and collude about how to best change the world, because they shake hands with them all, passing through the Wasteland into one of the other worlds.  Grady takes their hands, and shakes from them their alternate destines, to put back into the hearts of the little unborn babies.

It's romantic, I suppose, but Grady is a peace-loving man, and is sometimes confused about these very human acts of war.  Clyde seems to weather it better, but on some days I think he prefers war anyway.

A reason to put his boots on in the morning, Lucky reminds me in the back of my head.  Right, a mission, sure.  Grady's got the will and the time and the words for all the diplomacy he wants to enact.  Clyde is an inelegant creature made for vengeance.  More than one of our arguments has led to him kicking down a door.  But the mission for Clyde is getting the door down.  The mission for Grady is getting you to open it yourself.

Grady went down the beach to watch the ocean that morning, and mourn the dead.  And yes, he does the same for children who starve in drought and famine, and children who are never reported missing but get drowned in rivers for disabilities and every other terrible thing.  Some days he can stand it, and some days he can't, and maybe it's because it was Valentine's Day that he needed to watch the waves awhile, but I watched him watch the waves, and I talked to Lucky about all our fights.

In Gray House, I've fought the most with Grady.  They were all vicious in their honesty, and unrelenting.  He's stubborn and refuses to stop the course of his argument once it's begun.  I told all this to Lucky, who never witnessed them.

"He's got a temper," I told him as we strolled along the beach together.  Lucky's hair was greasy enough the wind barely lifted it.  "It's a quick one but I don't think he was ever cruel."

"He's got anger enough in his heart now," Lucky mused.  "That's what turns a man to cruelty, often enough."

"Well, Grady's not a man," I reminded him.  "So maybe he's not even angry in his heart."

"Sure but he is," Lucky disputed me, and turned me to look at him, and put both his hands on my shoulders.  "Listen close and you can hear it."

While I looked at Grady, Lucky whispered in my ear all the things Grady's heart was saying to us.  That he never understood hate and now he might just accept it instead of question it.  That to confront another person was always his path to understanding, but what good was that path when no one was willing to take it.  That he'd hurt Jack by this and was never given the chance to explain.  That the hardest thing about love and peace was all the work it took.  That he understood sometimes the violence which compelled people to do something harmful to make someone else look or see.  That he wanted an army of soldiers for love.  That his heart was broken and could only be mended with some kind of action.

"What kind of action?" I asked Lucky, and he lit a cigarette while considering his answer.

"Well," he thought, and picked tobacco off his tongue.  "Maybe he wants to be War Chief."

Coney Island 3

Dear Jack,

Because a man needs a mission, Lucky tells me.

The Warriors are born of the necessity of that mission.  There's no need for the Warriors to be in Coney Island until we feel like it's our land, and we want to protect it from outsiders.  Until we know in ourselves that there's something special about Joshua worth defending.

I'm sorry about what happened with Joshua.  Maybe you would've been able to stay if things went differently first with me, and then with Joshua, and then with Rosie.  Maybe everything would've been different.  We really couldn't know what we were getting ourselves into, but there was no way to tell you that back then and have you believe in it.  There was no reason to believe in us.

In a way, it's good you left.  Joshua is home now, and safe, but he's a scar on my heart a mile long, like where the wing of Buddy Holly's plane tore the frozen ground of Clear Lake.  You don't want a scar like that.  After you left, me and Rosie probably both had them, but we kept accidentally opening them up again, over and over.

When she said she was going to die if we kept at it, I shut up all my love for him and my hope for him into a little box, and I buried it inside me.  I remember she screamed it at me one night: "Joshua is never coming back."  So I chose to believe that, and move on, so we could both survive.  I guess you decided that, too, but on your own out there.

I'm glad you weren't home when my brother died because I think I would've gotten pretty arrogant with you and driven you away anyway.  I'm glad you weren't home when Joshua left those other times because we would've let you destroy anything you wanted to.

Hey, you want to hear something funny I just realized?  I always drive you away and Rosie always lets you leave.  Ain't we got fun?

I never had the right idea about you, Jack, but at least I was man enough to admit it.  You've never had the right idea about me, and you walk around with your head up your ass thinking the whole world is wrong and you're the only right one.  The whole world is out to get you and you're the only sane one.  The whole world is going to kill you and you've got to fight me to exist.

Maybe you do.  I was the one who shot Joshua, after all.  But who cares, right?  Who cares because this is the house where dead boys don't stay dead and with the right combination of words, maybe you could make Matthew love his way out of hell and back to you?

Yeah, maybe.  But I don't know.  It feels like we didn't account for... death being fine for the dead and ultimately damaging for the living.  We couldn't live here with Joshua, and just knowing that about myself makes that hole appear in me, not anything I did because of it.  I just couldn't love him enough to believe it was going to all work out.

But on the other hand, you never knew what I knew.  You never heard what Clyde said to me that night on the cliffs, when he confessed to me the truth of Gray House and all it's occupants.  Do you want to know what he said?  I've read it over and over and over again, just so I'll never forget.  On the cold cliff-side, he blinked back tears and he said:

Got a secret. Theeeeeese walls, theeeeeese bones, theeeeese cracks, theeeeeese skies, if they're empty they're full with let's do a little regret. Too hard to climb so tie it to a chair n beat the shitoutofit. We think we're men but we're children, fox. Okay?

You and I always wanted to believe that Clyde was the grown-up, but he never was.  And I guess it kind of makes it worse to think about Joshua's innocence at the same time I think about how he had to stop existing.  It kind of makes me wonder what happened to my own innocence.  We're children, aren't we Jack?  We get so stupid and careless with people's hearts.  Everything you did to Clyde - it makes it worse you did it to someone innocent.

But you couldn't face it, and I did.  I don't know if that makes me braver.  I think it makes me more masochistic, and maybe that's the same thing.  What I do know is that I came out on the other side of it knowing Joshua - maybe all of them - are worth defending.  Sometimes I feel I know it best because while it was me who pulled the trigger so many times, I cleaned up the blood afterward.  I buried the bodies.  I tried to bargain with God.  And that's how I became a Warrior.

-Evelyn

Coney Island 2

The streets of Coney Island at night buzzed with low whispers and insect movement.  In intervals, the train clattered through.  I went to sleep there at night with Brad under the bumper cars in the park, and the neighborhoods beyond it shimmered in the streetlights with something less innocent, bordering on the sinister.  Joshua's own unrest, maybe, and all the ways he's a derelict tow truck driver, a street magician, and an unscrupulous porn star.

The fact that things turned on us outside of the park did not go unnoticed by the Gray Family.  The seaside resort town could be as glittering of a gem as the sapphire set in a high school ring on the finger of a virgin, and embody just as much romantic and wholesome fun.  But it was still the drain for the cesspools of Brooklyn, the train bringing out knot after knot of listless teens and bored junkies.  After all, fun comes in all shapes and kinds, and Joshua is its master.

But maybe I said all that already, in the mention of the Rough Rider.  Invoking the name alone takes us down the rabbit hole of terrifying youtube videos and prickling sense of dread that is someone's idea of fun, and not mine.

It's in this way that angels are terrifying - the way I might call their amorality.  Rides are Fun, sex is Fun, games are Fun, candy is Fun, drugs are Fun, pranks are Fun, and Joshua's innocence will never distinguish a difference between them.  So there are syringes in the dumpsters on Neptune Street.

It didn't take long for something to overtake the mood of the Gray boys.

Gray House is a family, but Rosie and I are outnumbered two against ten, and it's easy to forget that while they're brothers, the Gray boys are also wild dogs.

They run through the bayou this way, yapping and biting one another's necks, their social strata unsure and undefined.  Is Clyde in charge?  Is Grady?  Is Brad, today?  Is Adam?  Jack comes home and always tries to make a guess, but what he doesn't account for is this - is Coney.  Jack thinks the social order of dogs is about power.  The Gray boys know it's about Fun.

Slowly, as the nights fell over the carnival lights and the midway games, they each started to chase their own Fun, the way a pack of dogs would, crawling out of the wet alleyways and smelling the air and running fast and deft on silent feet.  Rosie and I watched what they did, from the safety of the second tower loop of the Cyclone, our feet swinging out into black air.

Adam strolled the boardwalk half as casual and his ironclad adulthood would normally allow, itching the insides of his arms and lolling like the sun into the sea.  Brad bit his nails to nothing watching the girls on the beach and one by one, they began to disappear.  Clyde ventured to the far points of the beaches and slept close enough to the water to be drowned by the tide.  Drama vanished into the mechanical heart of the carousel and the songs on the wind.  Grady's hands got caked in layers of paint and engine grease, and his eyes hollowed from lack of sleep as he nightly rode the M train.  John watched the tourists with the ravenous glassy eyes of an unseen voyeur, and they, too, began to disappear.  Joshua made the mood dangerously summerish keeping the air warm and the rides running all night.  Matthew stalked the dark warehouses and store fronts for things to steal.  Nicholas glutted himself on food and beer and sex in the park bathrooms with strangers.

And something happened to Dean.  I've been trying to say what happened to him, exactly, for three weeks now.

Dean is the most mysterious and vexing person in Gray House.  At the drop of a hat, he is one thing and then another, one person and then another, and beneath all the people he can become is a shining white marble statue of blank-eyed perfection without personality.  Dean dresses himself in people, but the "real" part of him is as of yet unknown beyond the cool and self-contained emojis of his vapid text messaging.

Only Rosie will ever really know or understand what's inside all that marble.  But of course, she's still trying to get there, like the rest of us.

I feel like I know him.  I've watched him a long time, in order to know him at all, and I think I've seen the real him before, but it's his place to say who he is.  I think I also understand the dance he does, and who he adorns himself in, and when.  I think I understand the reasons he has for hiding himself.  I think I know him best of all, but I guess mothers are like that.  And how I know him - through mostly observation - means that I'll never love him beyond this place where I've become his caretaker.

The one part of Dean I could always count on to explain himself to me is Lucky.  Lucky is the most human and charming part of Dean.  In many ways, he's the simplest and most communicative part.  The trouble with Lucky is that he is either mistaken for the "real" Dean, which he emphatically is not, or he's seen as existing for the purpose of being charming and communicative, over the cold ice of Dean's real heart, and that makes him seem wicked.  It makes him a lie to mask an obvious truth.

The truth is...

The truth is that Lucky exists for a very special reason, that is also not my business to tell.

I had seen Lucky here and there in the park, usually at night.  Lucky looks just like Dean, but doesn't dress like him.  Lucky is the nickname earned because of his heavy accent and Irish charm, as well as the way things seem to turn out right when he's around.  When you see Dean, you'll know it's Lucky by the sound of his heavy, war-torn black boots and the smell of his sweat.  While Dean's hair is clean and highlighted and trimmed, Lucky's is long and dirty and hangs in his eyes.  Dean's movements are rigidly executed with a dancer's precision.  Lucky's shoulders are lax and usually dropped in a laugh.  Dean's eyes are warm, always, and forgiving.  Lucky's eyes turn both cold and angry.

See, he's a person, seemingly designed to shrug off all that which is familiar in the angelic sharp corners of Dean.  The antithesis of the Dean we know, I might even go so far to say.

What makes him Lucky here is evident by his red leather vest, sewn with the familiar insignia of a winged skull, declaring him a Warrior.

I want to be a Warrior, too.  Maybe we all do.  So somehow, Lucky became this voice in my head, explaining the story of us to me while I watched it unfold.

"Look there," I heard him whisper, and I saw four of the Gray boys, ignoring one another as they went about their business of Fun.  Clyde, Grady, Joshua, and Brad.

"D'ye see what I see, just over there?" he asked me, and I looked.

"What?"

And he whispered on, his hand light on my shoulder.

"Ah, so you want me to just tell you.  Alright, alright.  See, there's four men waiting for the word of God to fall on them like lightning."

Clyde watched the ocean.  Grady painted a message onto a wall.  Joshua threw old hot dog buns to a stray dog.  Brad carved his name into a telephone pole.

"How do you know?" I asked him, unable to resist throwing my own voice into the same lilt as his, and become Irish myself.  I felt him laugh from where he stood just behind me.

"Well, miss, I know because I know.  Can you not smell the fire in them?"

"I only smell the water."

"Oh my, that's what's got them restless," he told me.  "They need a purpose.  A mission.  A man needs a mission, I'll have you know."

"I didn't know."

He squeezed my shoulder with his dirty hand, and I felt him smile.

"Yes, he does.  Something is about to happen, you'll see."

That was on February 13th.